Instruments

The Observatory was founded in 1985 when first AWS was installed at the Italian Station "Mario Zucchelli" in Terra Nova Bay (77 °S 165 °E). From that moment on, the Observatory has been responsible for installation and management of meteorological instrumentation for the collected data making them available to the scientific community and for flight operations.
Currently the monitoring network includes:

• 2 radiosounding stations.
• 16 AWS working all year round.
• Several active optical remote sensing instruments and precipitation measurement.

Since 2000, in collaboration with the glaciologists of ENEA, the Observatory started to measure some parameters of the surface mass budget such as snow accumulation and the snow transport due to the effect of wind, through stakes farm and automated tools for acoustic sounding (driftometers).